Mark Butler (Port Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Climate Change and Water) Share this | Hansard source

Needless to say, we oppose this suspension of standing orders. There is no better way to sum up our opposition than the number 595. That is, 595 bills were passed through this House during the last term of parliament; that was in a House no less challenging than the Senate is now for the government and the opposition. We need to be very clear why we are back here this afternoon debating this suspension. Why we are back here is because this government could not organise a pig to be dirty. If there was a pig here and a mud puddle there, this government could not organise that pig to be dirty.

The chaos of last week was a window into the dysfunction of this government. It was an absolutely clear window into the dysfunction of this government. The agenda of this government is based on two things: broken promises on one hand, which sums up their budget to a T, and massive overreach on the other hand. The Prime Minister cannot find a road back from his massive overreach, his hysterical campaign about carbon pricing and his hyperbole and ridiculous claims about the impact of carbon pricing on households and on businesses. We see a Prime Minister who has a budget that is literally dissolving before his eyes. Exemplified by last week, he finds himself completely incapable of sensible, calm and methodical negotiation with crossbench members of parliament and senators.

Let us just recap the events in the Senate last week. We had a guillotine motion or as the member for Sturt, parroting the member for Grayndler, calls it: a debate management motion. We had a guillotine motion in the Senate to guillotine some of the most complex pieces of legislation for a new Senate, with new senators in both major parties and—perhaps more importantly—new senators on the crossbench. We had a committee that had a piece work to do over a period of about 2½ weeks, which was to draw out these questions that tripped up the government last week and to seek input from stakeholders.

But no, that committee was given the axe. Then, in absolute high farce, we had a guillotine culminate in a filibuster. The new chair of the environment committee was humiliated into having to ask questions of a cabinet minister, such as: 'What is an ETS? What is an emissions trading scheme?' That was so that Senator Abetz and a whole bunch of other government ministers, which I think included the Minister for the Environment, could sit out in the corridor outside—okay, not the Minister for the Environment; he was not even involved in those negotiations—trying to cobble together a deal with the Palmer United Party to deal with these ridiculous claims that the Prime Minister has made time and time again.

We know why and how we reached that position; it was because this government had not thought about the impact on business. This government had simply not thought about the impact on business of the variety of amendments that were being trucked around by the government or by Palmer United. They simply have not owned up to the litany of falsehoods peddled by this Prime Minister about the impact of carbon pricing on household budgets. At the end of the day, the rush, the guillotine, the chaos and the shambles we saw last week were all about trying to make sure that the Prime Minister could make the press conference date to announce something he simply was not able to deliver.

This Prime Minister assured Australian households that the carbon tax and the carbon pricing mechanism would force prices up and up on absolutely everything. He then promised, of course, that repealing the carbon tax would force prices down and down on absolutely everything. That was not just on electricity and gas but on everything, like on groceries, airlines and the prices of a house. That was on absolutely everything. But we know that that is just not true. You can ask the retailers; ask Woolies, ask Coles, ask the airlines or ask anyone else who the Prime Minister—then the Leader of the Opposition—verballed as having to raise their prices in the face of the carbon pricing mechanism. They have now said, 'Look, we never did. We never had to. As a result, we are not going to drop prices now, in spite of what the Prime Minister has said.'

The reality of the impact of the carbon pricing mechanism was exactly as we said it would be. There was a modest lift in electricity and gas prices that was completely covered by the household assistance package for pensioners and for lower and middle income households, either through family payments and/or a tripling of the tax-free threshold. Those prices would be significantly lower if the government swallowed its pride and accepted Labor's amendment to introduce an emissions trading scheme now.

For example, the power price impact in my state and the member for Sturt's state, South Australia, of the carbon pricing mechanism was about 4.6 per cent. Treasury has advised us that if the ETS—which we will again move this afternoon in this House—were adopted, then those prices would be reduced by about three-quarters so that the impact of a carbon price mechanism under an ETS framework would be about one per cent of power prices. That is more than covered by the household assistance package, changes to pensions, changes to family payments and the tripling of the tax-free threshold.

But this process that ended in such shambles and such utter chaos in the Senate has exposed the Prime Minister's litany of falsehoods that he peddled around the country about the impact of the carbon price mechanism. That is why, again, we have the member for Sturt come in and seek to gag debate on this important question. There are very serious questions now before this parliament. There are very serious questions that Australian households are asking themselves. There are critically important questions that Australian business is asking itself. We have seen the Australian Industry Group, the Business Council of Australia and a range of other organisations out over the last few days asking, 'Where is this going? As the AIG, what are my members going to be required to do in relation to the ACCC with these amendments?'

We do not know. The member for Sturt is trying to gag this debate without the government even circulating the amendment that will indicate, first of all, what businesses will have obligations to the ACCC under this amendment and, secondly, what price reductions this Prime Minister is willing to guarantee to Australian households. I suspect we know the answer to both of them and it will be a damp squib—a damp squib that exposes the falsehoods that were peddled month after month, year after year, by this Prime Minster when Leader of the Opposition about the impact of carbon pricing.

Last week the government promised to be an adult government. This government that promised a calm, methodical, cabinet-based approach to decision making cobbled together these amendments—we still do not know which of them they support—based on 15 minutes of discussion. We then saw the Minister for the Environment and Senator Abetz, the Leader of the Government in the Senate, conduct a press conference where they were either unwilling or unable to explain to the Australian people and to Australian business quite what the impact of the amendment that they had agreed to was—what businesses, what sectors of the economy, were going to be covered by these amendments that impose obligations on business vis-a-vis the ACCC. The Minister for the Environment could not answer that question at the press conference that he conducted with Senator Abetz on Thursday. The Minister for the Environment said on Adelaide radio on Friday that airlines and grocery retailers like Woolies and Coles would be covered by these amendments but he was then contradicted very clearly by lawyers who work in this area. We do not know which is right. We have a whole lot of people out there saying it is just electricity and gas; we have the Minister for the Environment on Adelaide radio saying it is airlines and retailers as well. We do not know, because the member for Sturt comes in here and tries to gag the debate without even circulating the amendment that, it would appear, they have stitched up with the Palmer United Party. This is the government that would not do deals with crossbenchers stitching up with the Palmer United Party a deal that is critically important for Australian business and critically important in terms of whether or not Australian households think that this Prime Minister can deliver on the guarantees he made time and time again, to the point of nausea. We want to know what those amendments are. This parliament deserves the opportunity to debate those amendments. This gag must be opposed. No wonder Australian households are beside themselves; no wonder Australian business organisations have spent the last 96 hours up in arms about this amendment. It is time that this parliament saw the amendment and had a serious debate about this government chaos.

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